Fran Smith

For more on the insanity of carbon tariffs, there’s an excellent 2008 article by the National Post’s Terence Corcoran appropriately titled “Blowing up the WTO.” Here’s what he says:

This is a legal and practical quagmire. To figure out the appropriate tax level would require a mind-blowingly elaborate carbon-measurement scheme, created on a global scale. It would have to be able to determine how much carbon emissions are embedded in the power drill that is nominally made in China, but is actually assembled from parts made in a dozen other countries. Some of those countries may or may not have carbon control programs in place.

Corcoran concludes:

. . . all this is a recipe for global trade wars. It would mean, in effect, blowing up the WTO trade system to create a parallel Carbon Trade System that would be based on the opposite principles. The objective would be to restrict trade, not increase it; to control trade, not liberate it; to increase trade conflict, not reduce it; to weaken the economy, not strengthen it.